One of the biggest roars from the Smith Center crowd Saturday came at halftime of North Carolina’s basketball game against Maryland.

The Tar Heel faithful was already feeling pretty giddy after a first half in which its team rolled out to a 22-point lead against an opponent that had just beaten rival N.C. State a few days earlier.

Few can get a crowd riled up like UNC football coach Larry Fedora

The energy level grew exponentially when football coach Larry Fedora grabbed a microphone, led a group of his players onto the floor and with the delivery of a charismatic televangelist hyped up on Red Bull, whipped his 19,000-plus followers into a frenzy by proclaiming UNC as the ACC’s Coastal Division champions.

It was a statement that wasn’t received quite as enthusiastically in other areas of the league’s geographic footprint since according to the NCAA, the ACC, the record books and everyone else who doesn’t consider the sky to be Carolina blue, the Tar Heels were ineligible to win any kind of official championship in 2012.

Internet message boards and social media sites lit up like the old red and white noise meter at Reynolds Coliseum with snarky comments over Fedora’s declaration – and the billboard UNC put up in Charlotte carrying a similar message.

The outrage, particularly among the Wolfpack Nation, was both predictable and understandable given the circumstances.

But is it really necessary?

A win at Miami helped UNC share first place in the Coastal Division at 5-3

The Tar Heels did, after all, earn at least a share of first place in the Coastal by tying Miami and Georgia Tech with a 5-3 league record. They would also have won a three-way tiebreaker to determine the divisional representative to the ACC title game if they weren’t being sanctioned by the NCAA for violations committed under the watch of former coach Butch Davis.

And they’re hardly the first team to ever proclaim itself an “uncrowned” champion.

There are undoubtedly thousands of people in Idaho who still wear their 2006 Boise State national championship t-shirts and hats proudly even though they know in their heart that Florida, not their beloved Broncos, was actually recognized as the nation’s top team that season.

There’s no harm in UNC celebrating a title that’s as legitimate as Heisman Trophy runnerup Manti Te’o’s girlfriend. It only becomes an problem if others decide to turn it into one.

Besides, having their neighboring rivals go Coastal over a billboard and a few meaningless souvenirs is only part of the reason why the Tar Heels continue to further their championship meme.

Doeren

The main issue here is recruiting and the already difficult task of keeping this state’s top high school prospects from leaving for other states to play their college football.

Things were already competitive enough as they were. But with State’s hiring of aggressive, young Dave Doeren as its new coach, Duke’s triumphant return to relevance under David Cutcliffe and UNC still dealing with a reduction in scholarships as part of its NCAA punishment, the battle between the Triangle schools only figures to become more fierce in the coming years.

None of the three can afford to give up any advantage to the others, which explains why the Tar Heels continue to wave their imaginary banner with such vigor.

It’s not an attempt by Fedora to thumb his nose at the ACC or even to needle the always sensitive fans a few miles down the road at State – although if that turns out to be the result, so much the better. Rather, it’s to tell prospective recruits that if you want to stay home and play “championship” football, then UNC is as close as you’re going to get right now.

N.C. State's current advertising campaign

The narrative isn’t all that different from the Wolfpack’s “Our State” campaign last summer. The idea there was to remind those same high school sophomores and juniors of State’s recent football dominance against the hated Tar Heels and to reinforce the message that if you want to be on the winning side of this competition, you have to wear red and white.

There’s no quantitative way of measuring how much of an affect either slogan has or will have on attracting players to Chapel Hill or Raleigh. But if the way they’ve managed to get underneath the skin of opposing fans is any indication, they’ve both been rousing successes.

I guess ill begotten gains is a concept foreign to the UNC fan base and hierarchy. Cheating for decades and then thumping your chest over a nonexistent title with players acquired while all the cheating had yet to be discovered just goes to show how hypocritical UNC and her defenders have become. The double standards of the NCAA and it’s own lack of integrity are the only reason UNC got off with one of the lightest wrist slap one could imagine.